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Patrick McQuillan, an Associate Professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Brown University.

Before coming to Boston, he taught for eight years at the University of Colorado in Boulder and for one year at Rhode Island College. He teaches secondary and elementary social studies methods courses and also offers seminars on qualitative research and experiential education. He works extensively in urban secondary schools and his current research interests focus on school reform, with an emphasis on the role of the school principal in transforming urban schools. His publications include Reform and Resistance in Schools and Classrooms: An Ethnographic View of the Coalition of Essential Schools (Yale University Press, 1996; co-authored with Donna Muncey) and Educational Opportunity in an Urban American High School: A Cultural Analysis (SUNY Press, 1998).

Prior to his University teaching, Pat was the co-director of a long-term ethnographic study of the Coalition of Essential, a national secondary school reform initiative based at chaired by Ted Sizer, author of Horace’s Compromise and Horace’s School. Pat also spent eight years teaching and coaching in various secondary schools, including a middle class suburban high school and a state school for boys, both in Connecticut, and a private country day school in Fort Worth, Texas.